Vacation
by Sarah1281
Summary: After the events of the Winter Soldier, Natasha meets up with Clint and has a few pointed questions about where he was when everything was going down and they could have really used him. In his defense, who checks their work phone when they're at Disneyworld?


Vacation

When Natasha found Clint waiting in her apartment with what appeared to be every Disney-related merchandise known to mankind, she honestly wasn't sure how to react.

"I see you're back from your trip."

Clint nodded. "Did you also see that I got you some souvenirs?"

Natasha made a show of looking around. "Oh, did you? Nice. Where are they?"

Clint laughed. "You'll find them, I'm sure. It'll be like Easter. Except this time you don't have a deadline before the hidden goodies start to smell."

"I'm pretty sure most people hide plastic eggs, Clint, not real ones," Natasha said, walking over to her armchair and throwing herself inelegantly into it. It had been a long day.

Clint took a seat on the sofa after taking a moment to reorganize the pile of Disney that had somehow found its way there. "Well sure but if you do it that way you could _never _find the eggs."

"You would think that the people hiding the eggs would remember where they were," Natasha said.

Clint tilted his head up. "You would think."

"Is there any point in asking why you brought all of the souvenirs over here?" Natasha asked. "Did you just buy something for literally everyone you know?"

"You know how people get about souvenirs," Clint said. "Everyone always gets one and gets mortally offended if they don't have them. It's like wedding invitations, honestly, even though half the time people don't actually want to go to the wedding of those people they don't know and are only vaguely related to."

"You might be the first person who ever compared getting a souvenir to being invited to a wedding," Natasha informed him.

Clint shrugged. "Well it's a good comparison."

"It's certainly original," she said neutrally. "Do you even know this many people, Clint?"

"Future souvenirs can come in handy, too," Clint said solemnly.

Natasha laughed. "What, like 'Hello person I am just meeting now for the first time. Have a memento of that time I went to Disneyworld five years ago.'"

"They will appreciate my thoughtfulness."

Natasha just shook her head. "But why is it all in my apartment, Clint? You have a perfectly good apartment you can put all your crap."

"I do," Clint agreed. "But this isn't _my _crap. It's _your _crap. I mean souvenirs."

"I…don't follow," Natasha said.

"These aren't all of the souvenirs I brought back," Clint explained. "These are just all the souvenirs I got for you."

Natasha stared at him. "Clint, these must be hundreds of dollars worth of souvenirs."

"Thousands," Clint corrected. "But whose counting?"

"You evidently," she muttered. "Is this some sort of weird apology for not being here when we were under attack by Hydra and couldn't trust anybody?"

Clint crossed his arms. "Oh, hardly. If anything _I'd _like an apology from _you_."

"I would really like to know how you figure that one," Natasha said bluntly.

"You published everything about SHIELD – including everything about me – on the internet," Clint complained. "I've gotten so much more spam now than I did before and there have been at least three fake dating profiles set up in my name. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure I'm now unemployed."

"Oh, the CIA or FBI or something like that will snap you up," Natasha said dismissively. "I've met with some of their top brass. It's like Christmas for them."

"If I wanted to work for the CIA or the FBI or something like that then I would already be working for them," Clint grumbled.

"Poor baby. I've got Sam Wilson trying to figure out how I could have possibly defected from the Soviet Union at seven since he overheard me saying that I used to work for the KGB and now work for SHIELD – or did at any rate before we destroyed it – and knows that I was born in 1984," Natasha complained.

"You could always just explain to him that you didn't defect when you were seven and once the KGB was officially disbanded you continued to work for what they became," Clint pointed out.

Natasha rolled her eyes. "I know I could but the point is that I shouldn't have to."

"And then there's also all the media scrutiny you have to deal with since Steve's been so injured, Hill is hiding over at Stark's, and Fury's pretending to be dead," Clint said dryly. "But yeah, a curious pseudo-superhero really is the worst thing happening right now."

Natasha's eyes widened. "How did you-?"

"About Fury?" Clint interrupted. "Well technically I didn't until just now but come on, Tasha. He's Nick Fury. Nicholas J Fury. I will believe he's dead…never. I will never believe he's dead. It's just not going to happen. I could fall into the ocean and wake up seventy years later like Steve did and the first thing I'd want to know is 'Where's Fury?'"

Natasha smiled. "I think by that point he'd actually really be dead, Clint. He's a bit older than Peggy Carter was and even she's not doing so well these days."

"That's just what he'd want you to think," Clint said confidentially. "But we all know that it will never really happen."

"I'm not sure if he'll find your faith touching or slightly disturbing," Natasha replied. "For that matter, I'm not sure either."

Clint just smiled enigmatically.

"I can't believe you missed out on Hydra destroying SHIELD!" Natasha burst out suddenly.

"Technically I think you destroyed SHIELD," Clint corrected. "Though I'm willing to bet it was all Steve's idea and I'm willing to concede that HYDRA may have mortally wounded it."

"None of that negates the fact that you weren't here for this!"

"I would have _loved _to have been here for it, Tasha," Clint told her. "Really would have loved it. I'm sure it would have worked out much better with four Musketeers instead of three, too. Because for all that you guys were on 'we can't trust anybody mode' you and Steve trusted each other and even some random guy Steve knew from jogging so I had better have also made the list."

"You were my entire list," Natasha promised him. "But that doesn't really matter since _you weren't here_."

"And whose fault was that?" Clint asked archly, raising an eyebrow.

Natasha raised both of her eyebrows right back at him. "The answer had better not be mine because if it is then you are seriously delusional. It cannot possibly be my fault that _you _weren't here."

"I think you'll find that it is nearly entirely your fault," Clint insisted. "And a little bit Fury's. I'm just a helpless victim in all of this."

"Right, because 'helpless victim' is what we look for in all of our SHIELD operatives," Natasha said sarcastically.

Clint shrugged. "I'm sure it doesn't matter since SHIELD no longer exists. Maybe it will be a problem once we get DLEIHS off the ground but until then I think I'm in the clear."

Natasha snorted. "DLEIHS, really? I'm pretty sure we can come up with a better name than that."

Clint nodded. "Like SHIELD 2 TTWDNH."

"TTWDNH?" Natasha repeated.

"This time we're definitely not HYDRA," Clint clarified. "I'd have spelt it out since HYDRA is also an acronym but no one would trust us if we had HYDRA just out there even if we explained that we weren't with them."

"We're seriously not that bad with names."

"And how long did it take Coulson to come up with shortening our ridiculously long official name to SHIELD?" Clint challenged. "I'll give you a hint. It was founded shortly after World War 2 and we finally got an acronym of our very own in 2008."

"Oh but be fair, Clint," Natasha said. "Coulson wasn't even born when SHIELD was founded. It didn't take _him _nearly that long."

"I suppose that is a fair point," Clint conceded. "But my helpless victim status aside, you don't get to complain that I wasn't there when it's your fault I wasn't there."

"I get to complain about whatever I want," Natasha corrected him. "And I'd love to hear how any of that was my fault."

"There I was, minding my own business and being perfectly available to help out with any catastrophic disasters that may arise," Clint narrated. "Such as, I don't know, finding out that HYDRA had actually been a part of SHIELD forever or Nick Fury dying or Captain America becoming a fugitive or the new director of SHIELD secretly being evil or our ability to kill seven hundred people in one go being totally unexpectedly being abused or anything like that. I don't know, I'm just spitballing. But I was ready."

Natasha sighed. "Here it comes."

"Then out of nowhere, I was betrayed. Betrayed by the one person that I had _always _thought I could trust."

"You're being a little dramatic," Natasha said. "Though not, I suppose, as dramatic as when you and Fury had this whole little commiseration when I was right there about how it's so hard to trust people these days and how you had better be careful or else you'll lose your eye, too, and be totally useless with a bow."

"It was nice of him to sympathize with me," Clint said. "Even if he was also sort of betraying me. But he just agreed with you and I had never had half the trust in him that I had in you."

Natasha rolled her eyes. "All I did was point out that you had far too many vacation days stored up and we were given those days for a reason and after that whole Loki mind-whammy thing maybe you could do with some time off."

"That might have been helpful after it actually happened," Clint said. "Not more than a year later."

"Ah but sometimes the trauma that we experience manifests long after the initial incident and it never really goes away, especially if left untreated," Natasha said wisely. "Besides, I hadn't seen just how much vacation time you were due then. And then you mentioned you'd never been to Disneyworld-"

"My fatal mistake."

"And I really had to do what I did. Which was suggest that you go and ask Fury about it and he agreed. I think he even asked you to bring him back a pair of those mouse ears."

"Which I did," Clint said. "In fact, I got two of them and put one of them on the grave. You know, just to keep up appearances."

"Right. But I didn't know that the world as we knew it was going to come crashing down," Natasha said. "It's not like we planned this."

"We never do. And we _never _know," Clint said. "That's why we must be always vigilant."

"Yes 'we' as in SHIELD. Or now the government as a whole. And maybe one day what we will definitely not be calling DLEIHS. But individual agents literally cannot be vigilant all the time and they need their vacation time. All I'm saying is that if I've been to Disneyworld then you had no excuse not to go," Natasha said. "But I didn't force you to go there, just to take time off work. You could have just moped around DC if you really wanted to."

"Yeah but if I had done that then I might as well be working. Since I wasn't working anyway I wasn't going to waste it," Clint told her. "Although it might have meant I could help with HYDRA."

"I can see where you would blame me for you not actually being on duty when HYDRA happened but if you weren't working then you might have been anywhere on the planet on a mission anyway," Natasha said. "There's no guarantee you would have been in DC."

"There's no guarantee that I wouldn't."

"Yes but if you're going to argue that I definitely am responsible for you not being here we need something a little more conclusive than 'maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't'," Natasha insisted. "None of that explains why you weren't picking up when I tried calling you. I mean, maybe you wouldn't have been able to get back here in time but you could have tried! Or maybe even just seen if you could help from Florida."

"I would have loved to do that, really," Clint told her. "But I think you'll find that that's also your fault."

"In addition to all of this, do you think it's my fault that you can't take responsibility for anything?" Natasha asked innocently.

Clint carefully considered the question. "You know, it just might be."

"So what is it this time?"

"You're the one who forbid me from obsessing about work all the time and suggested that I put the phone down every now and again so I just turned my phone off once I got there and only turned it back on when news of everything SHIELD and HYDRA getting onto the internet showed up on the hotel TV," Clint explained.

"I suggested not checking in every twenty minutes," Natasha protested. "The least you could do is check in every night or morning to see if anything big was going down."

"I figured it if was that important then it would make the news. And it did."

"Just not in enough time for you to actually do something about it," Natasha noted.

"Hey, it's kind of your fault you weren't specific enough."

"And kind of your fault you couldn't use your own judgment," Natasha countered. "Or didn't have better judgment, whatever. How exactly did you end up a SHIELD agent?"

"Do you see anyone else able to use a bow and arrow as a serious weapon?" Clint asked rhetorically.

"Maybe not but why is that a mandatory thing we must have in an agent?"

Clint shrugged. "It's a superhero staple."

"You were with SHIELD long before Tony Stark decided we were all superheroes."

"Let's be honest," Clint said. "I think that Coulson decided we were superheroes a long time before that. He just knew how to be discreet about it."

"We really could have used you," Natasha said seriously.

Clint sobered. "I know. I'm sorry I wasn't there. Though I probably had a much better time than you did and the heat's not really on me."

"So not _that _sorry then," Natasha concluded.

Clint shrugged. "Hey, can you blame me? Next time I'll check my phone more often."

"With SHIELD being wiped out, I think your vacation days have been as well and it'll be years before you've accumulated such a ridiculous amount again," Natasha predicted.

"Oh please. DLEIHS will totally transfer them," Clint said, waving a hand. "Oh, but that reminds me! Have you heard from Coulson recently?"

Natasha shook her head. "No, I've been trying to keep as low a profile as I can given that suddenly I'm the face of used-to-be SHIELD and I've been with Steve and you know that he doesn't know about Coulson being alive."

"That's kind of weird, don't you think?" Clint asked rhetorically. "It's a level seven secret and Steve's level eight."

Natasha shrugged. "I know and I've mentioned that. I feel a little weird about not mentioning it to Steve though we haven't talked about it so I haven't actually _said _anything that even he would consider lying. Apparently Coulson wants to tell him himself."

"And it's been over a year," Clint pointed out. "Why hasn't he?"

"I don't even know," Natasha said. "But what's going on with him anyway?"

"Something something he has an amazing new protégé something something he needs to talk to Fury immediately something something he was literally brought back from the dead. Like not revived after temporary death but he was totally and completely dead," Clint replied. "I don't know. I had a lot of messages to sort through so I wasn't really paying all that much attention."

Natasha stared at him. "I think maybe we should go catch up with our valued colleague Coulson. Or at least make Fury call him."

Clint nodded absently. "I got him one of those Disnified Captain American plushies I'm nearly positive Steve doesn't know exist but that Tony's probably getting royalties from."


End file.
